My Final Major Project Evaluation - UNIT 8/ UNIT 9

Unit 8 - Project Proposal (FMP)

Name	Maria Danneau
Pathway	Art & Design/Fashion Level 3 Extended Diploma Year 1
Your project title	Moonlight Pathway.
Section 1: Rationale (approx 150 words)		What is your reason or purpose for doing this project?
The reason I am doing this project is because I have always had a fascination in animals, specifically the canine family. I have spent most my life watching documentaries on wolves and African hunting dogs. They have always intrigued me, and ever since I was young I was always trying to draw my dog. When I was around 11-12 I began to watch, peoples own drawn animations on youtube, watching tutorials and looking at references, I enjoyed creating my own characters and giving them backstories. Seeing them grow and develop and gain a personal attachment to me. I began to focus on drawing wolves intensely, near enough every other day I was drawing wolves. I love how they live, how they work to survive, how they overcome. And so, I wanted to give them more love by drawing and studying them. That is why I have decided to base my animation on wolves.
Section 2: Project Concept (approx 250 words)		What is your idea and project question?
My idea is a wolf strolling through the forest at night in search for a drink, he reaches the stream and finally gets to drink. Once he has met his need of thirst he then heads back home, curls up in his cosy cave and goes back to sleep. Not a very complicated animation and it does not have much in it in terms of action and such, but it will be hard to make for me and challenge my skills. My project question is how will I turn my storyboard idea into a visual animation using Auto Deskbook.
Section 3: Evaluation (approx 100 words)		How will you evaluate your project and by what methods will you use?
I will evaluate by posting on my blog, and updating it every time I make changes, while also thoroughly describing and explaining each design and thing I post. I will use information and references and credit the people who I got them from, and I will also show in a detailed layout everything I am learning and how I came to get the ideas I have.
Proposed Research Sources and Bibliography (Harvard Format)
Youtube – Tutorials     Zoo – Images and Videos      Books – Animation tips    Documentaries – Visual knowledge.

Analysis
For my final major project I have decided to do a short 2D drawn story, about a young wolf walking through the forest and trying to find a drink and his cave to get back to sleep. In the story it will show him wondering around until he finds a little stream to drink from, once he drinks he then returns back to his cave and curls up to go back to sleep, its a very simple story but it will be shown through different angels and movement with the frames and background, it will be a good improvement of my wolf anatomy drawing while also keeping my own characteristic style to my design.

In order to get the best movements and most believable actions I will be doing much research on wolves anatomy and videos of wolves movement, as well looking at my favourite youtuber for inspiration with my art and my own attempts to animate. As shown below.

Research

For my research I looked up my favourite youtuber SumikoOneSan, I watched her animations and stories she had made from the past to help me get an idea on where to start with my own animation, I watched closely at how she made her wolves move and how she done her background to add this knowledge to my own final major project.
Here are some of her drawings/animations for reference that I used to help me.

Looking at her art and the way she animated gave me lots of inspiration for my own animation and where I am going to lead the story and in what ways, it helped me to plant through the story and make a simple storyboard to help keep me guided and on track. (Under Planning and Production)


And I also looked up videos of wolves walking to look at there legs in order to get more of an idea too but be able to help me alter it to be more characteristic and in my own style.

 This was a good animation for me to look at and use as research as it shows the wolf in a front view position and also shows emphasis on the wolves lips and flesh during the movement of the snarl.

 This animation was good for research as it helps me see a good angle in which to create my wolf howling and the movement in the head.

This animation I chose to help with walking as its slow and spaced out almost like showing a frame step-by-step appearance to help me clearly look at the joints.

I also looked at wolf anatomy with bones and muscle to help get a better judgement on the body and make it more easier to see how it would move where in which ways that show most realistic proportions.

All these pictures helped me to shape out the wolf in a more accurate way, even though my design of my wolf is very characteristic I still wanted it to move like a believable wolf, so looking at the bones and joins, with the diagrams of where everything goes to help keep correct proportion helped me a ton with make my own animation as smooth and as close to a real wolf as I possibly could.

 Getting labels on all the different parts of a wolf made it more successful in my own drawing because it helped me know where to add little details to be more effective.

 I even looked up diagrams of dire wolves (a species wolf that has been extinct for millions of years now, and was around in the ice age period.) Just to help me further increase my knowledge of the canine structure through bones.

Getting these diagrams in different angles also helped me to see how wide the shape of a wolf body really is, and it also helped me to get better understanding at different angels when drawing and keeping the body properly proportioned.

Looking at all these images gave me enough reference to try wolf anatomy myself and so I drew a head for practice.

My plans and production for the animation;
I started with doing my storyboard, which was to help guide me through my scenes in my animation. This is where I got to with my storyboard.

 In this storyboard I show roughly how the story is going to play out. The wolf walks calmly through the forest, and interacts with a squirrel. He does not be angry or try to hunt it, he is calm and civil, showing tranquility and peaceful intentions, different to the typical stereotype that is portrayed of the wolf.

 In this part it then shows him continue to walk on through the forest as he is on his own little journey, till he reaches a small stream, and begins to drink it rather fast, showing he was thirsty and that was his intentions all along.

By the end of it he is heading back home to go back to sleep, showing he had no intention to hurt anything or cause distress, he was just simply doing his own little thing.











I also done a few very simple sketches of a wolf in different angles for practice for my character.

I also did a character design sheet, close up, to show his features and his design more clearly with some information.

Name: Sinyari
Character: Wolf
Gender: Male
Age: Young Adult
Personality: Calm and Kind
Live: Forest
Activities: Stroll around
Friends/Family: None
Fears: Starving
Stereotypical: No
Appearance: Look at drawing
Items/Clothing: None
Dreams/Nightmares: None
Defining Moment: No
Movement: Casual/Calm









Once i had done some very simple and basic designs of a wolf in different angles i began to actually start animating, drawing frames. However i found it easier to shape and design my character on my phone, as using digital art was far more smoother and easier to correct mistakes with so with that in mind, I began using this software on my phone;

This app is something that can be downloaded onto any device, such as phones, computers, laptops, tablets etc. It gives you a wide variety of different tools an brushes to give you as much detail you can with each drawing, it lets you create layers and then hide and reveal layers in certain orders. So for me it is a perfect app to use when drawing my frames for an animation. It was so easy to use and made progress so much smoother for me, I have already started on the frames of the first and second scene and have been saving my progress step-by-step in order to see how I am improving and developing the animation. I started off with doing some simple sketches to try and get a good reference in shapes for the wolf's body and than I began to add detail to make the frames.

Before I did this though I decided to work on the first scene of my animation, which is the background, the landscape of the forest, and the focus of attention revealing it zoom in and fade to black, giving off the impression you are being taken into the forest.
Here is the step-by-step progress of the landscape:

Once I had the frames I put them together and this is the outcome of my first scene:

Here is a FEW of my simple frame steps for the wolf base.

Here is what the first cycle looked like with all the frames lined up.

I liked it but when I played through the animation it was a bit too jumpy still and it was not consistent enough for me. 

As seen in this first animation cycle attempt.

I could tell it needed more frames and so I spent time adding extra frames along these ones in order to help me create a more smooth and consistent movement.
As seen in this picture of my new frames.

Once I added these frames I tested the animation again and got a much better result, in terms of consistency and smoothness.

After I got a smooth and consistent design with my animation I started work on colouring the frames, I did not chose complex colours as I liked my design to be simplistic. Here are a FEW of the frames coloured.

Once I had added colour to all the frames I then started to move them into place to create the moving animation again as shown here.

And this was the animation I got afterwards, which I was very proud with.

Once I had completely furnished the walking of my now coloured wolf character, I began setting the scene with the entrance of a squirrel that gets spooked by the incoming wolf character. These are a FEW of the frames I did.

This was then the finished design with all the frames in there respected places.

However in order to draw this I did use reference to another artist, who made moving squirrel frames, here is the reference I used.

Using this for reference I was able to make my animations, I tested it out and got this as result.

         
Once I saw it worked correctly as long as I adjusted some frames I could make it move forward, so did and then joined the frames with my wolf to create one of the scenes of my final major project, and this was my end result so far.

I feel after all the work I have done on my FMP, I was able to answer my project proposal I had from the start, and I have learned that it is very difficult to master the animation of movement when it comes to making animals move smoothly and consistently. However I was able to find my strength through this, when given time I can perfect the anatomy of an animal so that it moves believably, I feel I'm at my strongest when I am drawing wolves and other canine family relatives.